WELLINGTON: The rush to wait at Wellington Airport just got faster, by a whopping 20 seconds or so. Customs Minister Nicky Wagner was there – grinning from ear to ear – as the airport’s new high-tech security gates were officially opened on Thursday morning.
And the grin was bigger still as she successfully navigated her way through the gates, which scanned her passport and scanned her face to confirm the Honourable Nicky Wagner was indeed Nicky Wagner, National MP.
E-gates were “fantastic”, she said.
“We have nearly 12 million people going across our borders every year and we need to find really good ways to process them.”
Customs border operations manager Geoff Wilson, a man who knows his gates, was also there, proudly showing off the state-of-the art technology.
Nationwide, the number of fully-electronic gates is rising from 22 to 51. In Wellington, that means where there was once three gates on arrival there are now five. On departures the number has risen from two to three.
But the big change is the gates are now an all-in-one operation. Once travellers touching down in Wellington had to suffer through 20 seconds at a kiosk then a further 20 seconds in the biometrics machine, checking for facial recognition. There was also, of course, the chance of a queue between the two.
The new gates do it all in one – scanning the passport and checking for facial recognition – all in 20 seconds.
Of course, those with check-on baggage still have to wait for that on the other side but those with only carry-on baggage are then out earlier.
The French-made gates came with a commercially-sensitive price tag and were not available from New Zealand suppliers, Wilson said.
Their installation in Wellington was brought forward slightly to deal with the larger 777 planes which would be arriving in September on the new Wellington-Canberra-Singapore route.
